Word: kenner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sixteen months ago, Kennerly and Gerald Ford began an odd-couple relationship. TIME assigned Kennerly to cover Ford as a vice-presidential prospect. Kennerly virtually lived with the Fords at their Virginia home during the two months of the vice-presidential confirmation hearings. Later he traveled for eight months with Ford. Young Kenner-ly's irreverence and high lifestyle, which includes a Mercedes, a six-room Georgetown house, and an affinity for pretty women, richly entertained Ford, who came to regard him as an "adopted son." The day after he was sworn in as President, Ford asked Kennerly...
...form that is supposed to facilitate understanding, frequently lapses into technological jargon. That fact did not seem to bother the Harvard selection committee that awarded Fuller the 1961-62 Charles Eliot Norton Professorship, a chair once occupied by T.S. Eliot. In trying to convey and assess Bucky, Hugh Kenner, a literary man who has written books on Joyce, Beckett and Pound, solves the Fuller packaging problem brilliantly. Instead of boxes, he spins a sort of geodesic Glad Bag in which Fuller's life, work and Utopian ideals are clearly and excitingly displayed, even as they are kept fresh from...
Fuller chose two years of silence, study and contemplation instead. "From his silence," says Kenner, "he emerged talking of everything at once, and was barely intelligible." His first book, Time-lock, a chain reaction of nascent Fullerese, was "like a cloud of gas just condensing into a galaxy...
...these days of disenchantment with technology, it is not too difficult to find blind spots in Fuller's vision. Many of his ideas are as old as Archimedes. He is too rational for human nature. He avoids details, particularly politics, in favor of charting immense generalities. But Kenner, who is a protecting angel as well as a biographer, offers a final word. Fuller's mission, he writes, is to spread a sense of wholeness and connectedness. Like Emerson and Whitman, he wants people to feel the universe in blades of grass and bubbles. He also retains the faith...
...even be right. At the back of every trend and tendency that mattered, anyway, he manages to find old Ez, puffing and prestidigitating- language theories, borrowings from Greek, Italian and Provençal, imagism, myth and verses from the Chinese. Of course some of the connections are weak, and Kenner is not above a bit of crankery on his own. He often wears his learning like a lead flak jacket and, like Pound, can be pithy to the point of incomprehensibility. But he has a contagious gusto and a splendid ear: the fragments of Pound's poetry that litter...